Month: December 2016

Thirty-eight percent of jobs are now designated as “managers, officials, and professionals.” These are decision-making jobs. Another 41% are service jobs that often rely on your thoughts as much as your actions.
Here’s a problem we don’t think about enough: Even as more professions look like Rockefeller’s – thought jobs that require quiet time to think a problem through – we’re stuck in the old world where a good employee is expected to labor, visibly and without interruption.

The result is that most people have thought jobs without being given much time to think, which is the equivalent of making a ditch-digger work without a shovel. Maybe this is why productivity growth is half of what it used to be.

Strange paradox – our knowledge and understanding of complexities in the world expands dramatically yet the time to think and analyse is getting smaller and smaller.

How do you make time to think?

Start with your calendar and make an appointment for 15-25 minutes to think and jot some notes on one current issue. Repeat the next day and the following day and so on. Gradually increase the time to 60 or more minutes. Remember to apply the outcomes of your thinking in your work and personal life.

There’s an infinite selection of activities in the world that might bring some value. If you insist on labeling every activity avoided as value lost, then no matter how frantically you fill your time, it’s unavoidable that the final tally of your daily experience will be infinitely negative.

We’ve trained people to be certain for years, and then launch them into a culture and an economy where relying on certainty does us almost no good at all.

Broken-field running, free range kids, the passionate desire to pick yourself—that seems like a more robust and resilient way to prepare, doesn’t it? Who’s teaching you what to do when the certain thing doesn’t happen?

I’m only at the start of parenting journey which in reality never ends. In the world of distractions and consumption finding ideas which help to teach real life skills, independence and resiliency is very important.

this is a golden age. Thanks to technology, our ability to find quality information and fresh perspectives is spectacular and growing rapidly. But at the same time, and thanks to the same technologies, we also have the power to quickly and easily find junk that confirms whatever ridiculous thing we think, share that misinformation, and spend all our time connected exclusively to people as deluded as we are. There is no technological fix.

No one knows how long they have to live, but sadly, we can be sure of one thing: we’ll waste far too much of life. Waste it sitting around, waste it chasing the wrong things, waste it by refusing to take the time to ask ourselves what’s actually important to us. Far too often, we’re like the overconfident academics that Petrarch criticized in his classic essay on ignorance — the types who “fritter away their powers incessantly in caring for things outside of them and seek themselves there.” Yet they have no idea this is what they’re doing.

So today, if you find yourself rushed or uttering the words “I just don’t have enough time,” stop and take a second. Is this actually true? Or have you just committed to a lot of unnecessary things? Are you actually being efficient, or have you assumed a great deal of waste into your life? The average American spends something like forty hours a year in traffic. That’s months over the course of a life. And for “traffic,” you can substitute so many activities — from fighting with others to watching television to daydreaming.